I had conversation with my classmate Karen on the image cluster & idea blog posts. Since, I had just one image and a video, to her, it seemed suggestive of the direction that I was probably interested in. Which wasn’t true. Lesson learnt - an image cluster should probably have visuals for all the ideas/ thoughts/ people/ places that you want to explore as a part of your research. Karen suggested to add more images for the other ideas that we discussed in our conversation. She also said that having a quote like “donatedon'tdump” (originally from Rob Greenfield’s campaign) for image was helpful. It helped her align her thoughts and get to concept quickly. That’s about the image cluster critique.

Further on in our conversation, we touched upon some of the thoughts that were floating in my head, like, do I want to:

focus on how to create awareness amongst people to optimize their food consumption

how to use the excess food for a better purpose (like feeding the hungry)

how can technology play a role to minimize food wastage in homes

how can a person/ family contribute to less food waste, higher social responsibility amongst people

has food consumerism (large portions, big food bags in supermarkets) contributed to increased food wastage? (especially in the western world)

Karen also pointed out if I had a particular geography that I want to focus on, since food problems are very different in different parts of the world. This, I agree is really important and could be a pivoting point for my project.

One of the idea that Karen suggested was a “food-swapping" group. Something like a barter system, where a group of people sign up for a community-based service that enables them to exchange their excess food with something they need. It could be interesting to explore the different challenges, like trust, in terms of quality of food, freshness, exchange dynamics, considering there is a strong mentality associated with food purchase and consumption. It might be a fun thing to uncover more of these challenges by quickly testing this within the SVA IxD community.

Next Steps:

Update image cluster with representation of all the ideas discussed in conversation with Karen.